Save Pocket favorites to nvALT with IFTTT and Hazel

Here’s a quick script that works with an IFTTT recipe to put your Pocket favorites into nvALT as Markdown. It works well for me because I typically use Pocket to store articles that are more informational than time sensitive. If you star a lot of “newsy” articles, this is probably a bad idea, but for reference material it’s helpful.

Set up the IFTTT recipe to point to a custom Dropbox folder, or use the default IFTTT folder and give your files names that are easy to pick out with Hazel (e.g. use a hardcoded prefix).

Save the script below and edit it, changing the $target_folder to your nvALT notes folder. Then set up Hazel to take new files in that folder and run the script below on them. You need to have nvALT store your notes as text files. Not just because of this, I mean in general. Really.

If you have the OpenMeta CLI installed, it will transfer any tags you put on the post to nvALT. If you want to mirror those to Mavericks tags, be sure to get the latest build of openmeta.

That’s it. Any time you favorite an article on Pocket, you should get a new nvALT note with a Markdown version of the article. It uses the Marky API for converting to Markdown, but you don’t need anything extra to do that.

If I may make a shameless plug — and I may, because this is my blog — the Markdown results look great in Marked 2 with the Mutli-column theme. If you’ve never tried it, it’s pretty cool. I’ll post some tips for reading long-form articles in Marked later today.